


When The Night Falls (Loneliness Calls)

by blackorchids



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Aftermath, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, BAMF Octavia, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Hopeful Ending, Lincoln dies, Octavia Leaves, Octavia-centric, POV Octavia Blake, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-17 23:04:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7289614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackorchids/pseuds/blackorchids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Her anger and the boiling hurt fuels her journey for fourteen sunrises and nightfalls. After, her desperation to escape keeps her going.</i><br/>Or, Octavia leaves Arkadia, and it sucks.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	When The Night Falls (Loneliness Calls)

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [23emotions](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/23emotions) collection. 



> **Prompt:**  
>  _nighthawk_  
>  n. a recurring thought that only seems to strike you late at night—an overdue task, a nagging guilt, a looming and shapeless future—that circles high overhead during the day, that pecks at the back of your mind while you try to sleep, that you can successfully ignore for weeks, only to feel its presence hovering outside the window, waiting for you to finish your coffee, passing the time by quietly building a nest.
> 
>  
> 
>  **Notes:** title from dance with somebody, by whitney houston, though the bootstraps version fits the narrative better

_in a city of fools, I was careful and cool_  
_but they tore me apart like a hurricane_  
**_therapy_** \- all time low

* * *

She measures distance by how sore her feet are at the end of each day, only stopping when the darkness becomes too thick that even her eyes, well used to pitch black environments, cannot see her hand in front of her face. When she can go no further, she clicks the flashlight on and uses the eerie white glow to start a small fire and pitch the tiny tent, full of patches but made of that durable tarp parachute that had slowed the Dropship's descent to earth. Once the fire is going, she clicks the torch off and sits in front of it, warming her hands and squeezing enough water into her dehydrated rice meal that it turns into an edible, if disgusting, mush. She only hunts every third day, keeps to the smaller animals so there's not much to carry along, because growing up with two peoples' worth of rations stretched among three bodies had instilled upon her that wasting food was the ultimate sin.

Her anger and the boiling hurt fuels her journey for fourteen sunrises and nightfalls. On the fifteenth morning, she walks until the sun is high in the sky, and then she bothers to utilize the tracking skills she'd been carefully taught to find a water source. She stumbles across a quarry some time later and lobs a few large rocks into the water to check for those enormous watersnakes she's still got the scar from from their very first day on the ground. Only after carefully refilling all of her water-skeins does she remove her clothing and step into the tepid water. She splashes around for a little, forcing some unconvincing laughter from her throat just to see if she still can, ducks her head below the surface and stays there, eyes shut tight, until her lungs _burn_ for air. Counts ten more beats until she surfaces, gasping and panting.

Octavia scrubs her clothes with a small rigid stone and lays them out on a boulder to dry in the late afternoon sun, combs through her hair with her fingers as much as she can and braiding it back the way Indra taught her, screams until all of the birds in vicinity scatter and her throat feels like it's bleeding and raw. She stays crouched in the water until it's so cold her teeth are chattering, builds her fire before the sun has completely set, for once, and prays she doesn't fall ill due to her wet hair in the cold night.

After her fire burns itself out and she crawls into her tent, having forgone her nightly mush, she lays there, in the dark, and cries until she falls asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

*

Working for a collective handful of months as Clarke's righthand woman in medical had taught Octavia a lot, and, as she reluctantly examines her blistering feet, she thinks even stony, robotic Clarke would suggest taking it easy for a couple days. It'd be better to rest now, than be unable to run or climb in a few days should she need to, Clarke would say. In the _very_ beginning, she'd even brush Octavia's hair out of her face, because, between the time Jasper got shot and most of them had been drugged and taken into the Mountain, Clarke had done a decent job subtly mothering the lot of them, when she thought they needed it.

Thinking about Clarke makes Octavia's fists clench so hard her knuckles go white and her jagged nails dig into her palms, but she decides to spend the day resting anyway. She finds some of that miracle seaweed their resident delinquent medic swears by floating around in the deeper end of the lake and grinds it up between two rocks as best she can, slathering the goop over the worst of her cuts and sores. Skins the two rabbits she'd caught in a pair of traps over night so she can eventually turn their furs into mittens or socks.

As the sun climbs into the cloudless sky, she retreats back into her still-pitched tent, ears peeled for any noises at all even as she digs through her pack for Lincoln's journals at the very bottom. She's memorized most of the entries by now, and the portrait he'd done of her had been ripped out of the binding weeks ago. She'd discovered, as she had prepared his body for the pyre, that he'd folded it up and stuffed it in the inside pocket of the Ark Guardsman jacket she'd been so irate with him for wearing.

She reads about herself through Lincoln's words, chokes down some cold meat, spends a few hours staring at the top of her tent until the sun rises. As she's packing up, a jaguar leaps from _somewhere_ and only misses because Octavia had just ducked down to pick up the furs she'd left on the boulder to dry. She whirls and unsheathes her machete in one well-practiced move, but the thing's skin is thick enough on its back that she only seems to be angering it more.

"Come and get me, you little bastard," she spits, voice surprisingly steady for someone who hasn't spoken in weeks and hasn't made any verbal noises since she'd screamed until she was blue in the face three days earlier. She folds into a crouch, ready to leap, and when the jungle cat jumps, she jumps too, tackling it with a war-cry and rolling, trying to avoid the claws and the fangs.

The cat swipes at her face and Octavia screams, spitting blood from her mouth, but continues without faltering, yanking a dagger from around her thigh and plunging it into the thing's eye, using the second of distraction to swipe the machete through the air, beheading the creature in a burst of strength and a shower of hot, sticky blood.

The clearing seems eerily silent in the aftermath, as she pants and her heart thunders in her ears, still half-sprawled over the jaguar. She eases off and up, yanking her longblade from the earth and stepping over the body to free her dagger from the skull so she can clean both. Blood is dripping into her eye and when she wipes her mouth her face burns and her hand comes away covered in it, so she sets her pack down and resigns herself to one more night in the clearing, unwilling to travel in her newfound filth.

*

Five sunrises later, the jaguar's skin is dried out enough that she can fold it up and stuff it inside her pack. It starts to rain almost as soon as she sets off, but she just digs out the tarp and wraps it around herself, determined to keep going. She'd been averaging nearly eight miles a day, according to the soreness of her feet each night, and she was still well within the Woods Clan's territory, but she wanted to be far enough away that no one she knew would have an easy time finding her.

She thinks about Clarke, and the rest of the delinquents, and all of Arkadia, and very carefully does not wonder if anyone would even _bother_ coming to get her. She does not think about Bellamy.

*

In the nights, she eats her mush and cleans her growing collection of furs and recounts stories of how the earth had been before the nuclear war. She reads Lincoln's journals until her favorite pages are creased and covered in her dirtied fingertips. She sleeps fitfully.

Eventually, she reaches the easternmost part of the land, and begins to follow the coast as clear south as she can manage while staying hidden in the trees. She recalls stories about the ancient gods--how the one of the seas, Poseidon, had always been the most interesting to her. Living underneath the floor her entire life meant that things such as the ocean had been unimaginable concepts. Now that it's not a hundred paces to her right, past the treeline and through the odd sandy area, she can scarcely bear to look at it.

Instead, she busies herself with recording what new plants she sees in the pages of Lincoln's medical journal, writing down the names of the occasional Trikru clan member she crosses paths with, and any new words she adds to her already-extensive vocabulary. The further south she heads, she knows, the further away the people are from any other clans and, subsequently, the fighting and the truces, the sky people and the mountain men. She goes days without speaking English, finds herself writing idle thoughts down in Trigedasleng, letters still careful and precise as she'd been taught.

A young family encounters her when she's stripped down to her bra and briefs, and the woman comments on the winding tattoo she's got curling up her arm and across the back of her left shoulder, fanning out where her shoulder-blade meets her spine.

"He died," she says shortly, in Trigedasleng, and the woman sends her two children up the small hill with who Octavia assumes is her own husband. "My husband is dead."

The woman gasps, makes noises about how young Octavia is and how sad she must be and Octavia listens somewhat impassively. She's not sad, because if she was, she'd never be able to take another breath, much less travel another mile. The woman seems to realize that this is hardly polite conversation and blushes prettily, introducing herself as Farrow and explaining that her children are Declan and Ivy and her husband is Tomás.

"Ai laik Okteivia kom--" and here, Octavia breaks off, lips down-turning, just a little. She'd learned how to say it with the word Skaikru, and she'd been permitted to use the word Trikru, but, well. Leaving probably put an end to both of those statuses. "kom Okteivia," she jokes weakly, but it falls flat in the face of the all-too-knowing expression. This woman looks nothing like anyone Octavia has ever met before, but the expression reminds her so much of the people she's left behind.

Farrow invites her for dinner and to spend the night on the floor of the family's modest hut and refuses to take no for an answer. Octavia leaves the beautiful jaguar fur, neatly folded, on the crudely-built table and steals away into the night, running until she cannot bear to run any longer.

*

The night before she reaches the beach that Lincoln had starred in his little map, she dreams of her mother, pale-faced and wild-eyed and likely exactly what Octavia will look like in her age. Aurora had sometimes taken extra tailoring jobs so for extra rations, but she'd always said that wanting extra rations too often would alert someone higher up than them. Bellamy had cleaned dozens of higher-ups' apartments so he could scrimp and save for a worn terrycloth fabric to use to sew a tiny stuffed bear so Octavia wouldn't be alone under the floor, but Aurora had found it, hidden underneath his pillow, and screamed at them both for an hour, yelling that a boy his age wanting fabric and a needle was suspicious. That's about when she'd started poking around, trying to find a way to get him into the cadet program.

Sometimes, though, Aurora was soft and warm, allowing Octavia to curl up next to her on the top bunk for hours while she'd pet her hair, tying it back with a single scrap of fabric. Having and hiding her second child had torn apart what Octavia had always assumed to be a strong and beautiful woman, but in those moments, when Aurora acted like how Bellamy described she'd acted when he was trying to defend her and comfort his sister in the same breath, Octavia felt like she could breathe a little easier.

That moment, curled up with her mother on the inside of the top bunk, just in case, warm, for once, and heartbeat steady, had played behind her eyelids from the time she shut them to the time she awoke, an hour or so before the sun broke through the horizon.

The beach is deserted in the early hour, the only sign of life the handful of fishing boats far out in the distance, tiny specks interrupting where the sky meets the water. Octavia sits in the sand for a while, watching the sun rise steadily, and only moves on when the boats start to make their way inshore. There's a strange collection of shapes in the distance, and Octavia knows from what Lincoln said that the village elder had described that there's an abandoned town from before the war. Not all clans believed it was bad luck to inhabit dwellings from the old days, but the Woods Clan did, and Octavia figures she'd be able to camp out in a ruined building for a few days while she figures out whether or not she wants to go further.

She stops when she can see the main street, either side surrounded by places in various stages of destroyed, climbs a tree so no one will come across her. She writes in the free pages of the journal for a while, putting down words as though it's a letter, imagines she's telling them to Lincoln's face and imagines his responses. Thinks about no one else as she finishes the journey to the city with enough time to clear out any critters inhabiting the structure she's chosen to spend the night in. She settles down, each blade clenched in a fist even as she sleeps, and wakes sore and exhausted, but curious enough to poke through each building and drag anything of interest that she finds back to where she'd set up camp. Most of the places she explores are empty, nothing left but huge piles of rubble that she almost wants to attempt to move, if only to see if anything survived beneath it all, but once in a while she'll come across a place that's standing enough she can go inside and snoop around. She remembers photos of buildings that reached the sky and breached the clouds and thinks maybe a couple of these buildings had done that, but most of them don't seem to be any taller than the tallest point of the Ark had been, stuck in the ground as it was.

For half a second, she wishes she were artistic, so she could sketch out the skyline, and she has to stop and breathe through the wave of pain that settles around her heart and lungs as she misses Lincoln fiercely. Doesn't think about who else she knows who was good at drawing. Swings a long narrow wooden _thing_ into a wall in combined rage and grief.

Decides that she's explored enough for the day and makes her way back to her tent in her chosen building, final few treasures carried with her. She pulls out the last of the meat she'd saved and mixes it into her mush and tries to think about nothing at all.

*

She wakes up crying. Back at camp, members of the hundred had often woken up screaming and sobbing, and, in the months Clarke had been gone, Bellamy had been the go-to person when this happened. Octavia had watched as a few of them stumbled in and out of her brother's tent at all hours of the night and, sometimes, day, and the scene was quite different from when he'd turned into a leering over-sexualized jerk in their first week on the ground, but also oddly similar. _She_ hadn't been captured by the mountain men, and, then, the worst thing she'd experienced had been Lincoln turning into a Reeper, and that'd been fixed. Done. Caput.

She remembers Clarke arguing with Nyko about _putting Lincoln to rest_ , remembers the relief when they'd taken the shock wand and kickstarted his heart. It'd felt like they'd restarted hers in that same moment, when he'd looked at her with recognition in his gaze. She remembers when she used to wake up crying under the floor, unable to breathe or think, and Bellamy had scooped her up, no matter how old she was, and petted her hair until she'd managed to steady her heartbeat.

Remembers that and, for the first time she's willing to acknowledge, misses him as much as she hates him.

*

It takes her two days of laying, un-moving, on her side, before she's ready to get up and finish exploring the street of ruins. It had taken hours before she'd managed to calm down, and, with that, her anger had pushed its way forward once more. She finds an enormous metal _bowl_ she can fit inside, with little claw feet at each corner, and thinks about what Raven would want to do with it. Finds a few cars and a selection of utensils she keeps, and some sheets that are in relatively decent shape. Stares at the small stack of surviving books for a long time. Doesn't take them back with her.

For the first time, she writes about Bellamy in her letter to Lincoln. Tears the page out and wads it up and tosses it into her tiny fire.

*

Writes the same letter again the next night. Keeps it.

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me or prompt me on tumblr [@rosalinesbenvolio](http://www.rosalinesbenvolio.tumblr.com)!


End file.
